Brian Krzanich, who was recently named chief executive, said that although Intel has been slow to respond to the rapid rise of tablets and smartphones, the company is well-positioned to participate going forward.

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For the current quarter, the company forecast revenue of $975 million, plus or minus 2 percent, implying a range of between $955.5 million and $994.5 million. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters most recently expected $1.01 billion.

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A teardown analysis conducted by the market research firm IHS, due to be released tomorrow, has pegged Samsung’s cost of materials and manufacturing to produce the U.S. version of the 32 gigabyte model of the S4 at slightly above $237 per unit. Without a contract subsidy, the entry-level 16GB version of the phone costs $639 when sold by AT&T Wireless.

The cost is somewhat higher than that of Apple’s iPhone 5, the base model of which costs $205 to build for a 16GB version, according to an IHS analysis conducted last fall. It’s also well above the cost of Nokia’s Lumia 900, which costs $209 to build, IHS found at the time.

The S4 cost is not far below the cost of Samsung’s larger Galaxy Note tablet, the cost of which IHS estimated last year to be $270.

Most phone manufacturers source their components from many different suppliers. But Samsung, a large, diversified manufacturer of many different kinds of electronic components, has used its significant capabilities to supply itself with many of the key parts inside most versions of the S4 phone sold around the world.

“Samsung’s strength is this ability to in-source to itself,” IHS analyst Vincent Leung said in an interview. “They just keep adding to the list of components that they can supply to themselves.”

One key component that Samsung did not supply to itself for versions of the phone being sold in the U.S. was the main applications processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, which contributes $20 to the overall cost.

Versions of the phone sold in Korea and other markets around the world contain a Samsung-made chip called the Exynos 5 Octa that costs $28. Samsung is known to be manufacturing at least four variations of the phone for different market geographies around the world, including at least two being sold in the U.S., one going to AT&T and T-Mobile, and another going to Verizon Wireless and Sprint, said Andrew Rassweiler, another IHS analyst.

“Samsung is demonstrating its ability to suit the tastes of carriers in different regions of the world,” Rassweiler said. “It comes down to what the market is willing to spend on the features offered.”

The fact that Samsung used the Qualcomm-made chip is a testament to the U.S. chipmaker’s prowess. “Even with all the vertical integration it’s doing, it’s not like Samsung has given up on Qualcomm,” Rassweiler said.

One interesting difference between the U.S. and Korean versions resulted from the difference in the choice of processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain an image-processing chip made by Japan’s Fujitsu that added $1.50 to the total cost. Leung says that in the Korean versions, some of the image processing is handed off to Samsung’s Exynos chip.

Samsung also supplied the flash memory used to store data on the device. IHS estimates that 16GB of memory added $28 to the cost of the device.

The Korean giant also supplied itself with a display and touchscreen parts, which added $75 to the cost of components. The combined display package also includes Gorilla Glass, a strong glass material made by U.S.-based Corning.

Samsung is also thought to have supplied itself with several unlabeled components, including the camera module and some wireless baseband chips.

A few non-Samsung suppliers include Broadcom, which provided Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips; Maxim, which provided a power-management chip; and Triquint Semiconductor, which provided some wireless chips.

The new details about the decision to name Krzanich as the successor to retiring CEO Paul Otellini emerged in a brief report by CNBC’s Jon Fortt (video below) after he talked with Chairman Andy Bryant, who led the board’s search.

The joint pitch initially threw the board for a bit of a loop if only because it’s a highly unusual — and, one would presume, risky — move, in so delicate a matter as CEO succession at one of the world’s most influential tech companies. While the conclusion, at least as far as Krzanich goes, certainly appears to have been a predictable one — every Intel CEO since Andy Grove has been COO first — outsiders were still in the running until the very end.

Also a key selling point, though there are as yet no particulars about this, was Krzanich and James’ vision for pursuing the mobile market where Intel is as yet not participating significantly. Expect more noise on that subject once the pair starts their new jobs after May 16.

In November, when Paul Otellini announced his surprise retirement, I pointed out in a piece covering all the major contenders to succeed him, that every Intel CEO since Andy Grove was COO first. Krzanich will be Intel’s sixth CEO.

And while a lot was made of the fact that Intel’s board of directors was willing to look outside the company, and a lot of people rooted for Intel to name an outsider to run it, the board, led by its chairman, longtime Intel CFO Andy Bryant, decided to stick with established practice.

It’s not as though outsiders were not considered. I’ve heard reliable chatter that the headhunter Intel hired reached out to several people who turned the opportunity down. They include: Oracle President Mark Hurd; VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, an Intel veteran once considered a likely successor to Otellini, but who was recruited away by EMC CEO Joe Tucci; and Michael Daniels, the former head of IBM’s services business, who retired on March 31.

Krzanich was promoted to the COO job in a surprise shake-up last January. He had run worldwide manufacturing, and as COO he took over some IT and human resources functions that had previously belonged to chairman Bryant. He joined Intel in 1982, and has been an on-the-ground plant manager at Intel’s complex in Arizona. During 2001-2003, he oversaw a complex transition in Intel’s manufacturing technology across its entire global footprint of factories.

Patrick Moorhead, head of research firm MoorInsights, said Krzanich’s naming is a deliberate signal that at a high level much of its strategy will remain the same: “The strategy that has kept Intel running for the last 20 years will remain unchanged: Fab first.”

That means that Intel’s factories — the sprawling multibillion-dollar facilities known in chip industry lingo as “fabs” — will continue to be filled in the most efficient way possible. Intel is at its core a manufacturing company, and is indeed one of the few major chip suppliers left — Samsung is another — that owns its own fabs.

Since they’re so expensive to build, and equally expensive to equip, and since they need to be retooled every few years, Intel’s business model is probably one of the biggest exercises in managing depreciation over time.

The move is also a signal that pushes back against the people who have argued that Intel needs a strategic shake-up. At a moment when PC sales are sliding at a historic rate in favor of tablets and smartphones, Intel has largely been absent from those markets. So it’s no surprise that Intel’s earnings results have suffered in recent quarters.

Meanwhile, phone makers and tablet makers have been using chips from companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia that use designs licensed from the British firm ARM Holdings. ARM-based chips are in practically all the world’s smartphones. Apple uses them in the iPhone and iPad, and they appear in most Android-based phones and tablets, as well.

As Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip operations, told me in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile in New York last month, the company has made some strides in the mobile space, landing its chips in some phones and tablets, but they haven’t caught on in huge numbers yet.

There’s another important signal to consider. Renée James, the head of Intel’s software business, was named president. She has been chairman of the McAfee division that Intel acquired when it bought out that security software company last year, as well as of Wind River Systems, another software acquisition. For several years she has also been Intel’s point person in its dealings with Microsoft. While she was officially mentioned as a contender to be CEO, she is, at 48, still in contention for the post. She also sits on the boards of Vodafone and VMware, and for a time was Andy Grove’s chief of staff. (And, as I like to point out for fun, like me, she’s a University of Oregon graduate, and finished her MBA there the same year I was wrapping up my BA.)

But James’s elevation to president also sends an important signal about the rising importance of software at Intel. While Intel is at its core a manufacturing company, it has recognized the importance of software and acted accordingly. As Moorhead put it: “Intel once said it is the third-largest software company in the world, and I can’t prove, but I believe it. Intel is sending a really important message here. It sees software as where the puck is going.”

Shares are experiencing cumulative volume today of 73.7 million shares, versus a 30-day average of 16.74 million.

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And from venerable technology newsletter Microprocessor Report, come two intriguing technical articles today discussing some of the technology advantages of the chip giant.

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As of 3:05 pm ET today, Fusion shares were trading at $19.89, up $3.26 (or 19.6 percent) from a $16.63 closing price Wednesday. For one thing, the company reported quarterly results yesterday, and gave forward guidance for the current quarter that was better than anyone expected.

Another thing? There’s a new Facebook data center going up in Iowa. And as everyone who follows Fusion-io knows, Facebook and Apple are its marquee customers. A new data center means that a lot of new Fusion-io products are selling.

As CEO David Flynn pointed out in an interview this morning, that can be a blessing and a bit of a curse. Earlier this year, Facebook and Apple trimmed orders and Fusion was forced to trim its outlook. Now, with Facebook building again on a site that’s big enough to accommodate at least two more facilities just like it, there’s a brighter outlook. But if you take out the up-and-down side of Fusion’s business that caters to Apple and Facebook growth, Flynn said, there has been a nice, steady, predictable ramp.

There are also new customers to report: Box, the fast-growing enterprise cloud services company, has started adding Fusion-io products to its servers. So has music service Spotify.

Then there’s the matter of the $119 million acquisition of NexGen, a Louisville-based company that specializes in taking traditional hard-drive-based storage products aimed at mid-range companies and combining them with Fusion-io’s flash-based technology. The combination gives Fusion access to a base of customers it wasn’t previously reaching. “We started out reaching the companies at the top of the pyramid, and the fact is the size of the market opportunity in the middle market is bigger,” Flynn said.

The deal has Fusion paying $114 million in cash and $5 million in stock. It’s Fusion’s second acquisition this year. Last month, it acquired ID7, a British software firm.

The San Diego-based company said revenue jumped 24 percent, and projected a range for revenue growth in the current quarter with a midpoint of nearly 31 percent.

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As if you needed another indicator about how much the old Wintel world of PCs has flipped in the last couple of years, take a look at the earnings results of the British chip designer ARM, which just reported quarterly earnings this morning.

Sales rose by 29 percent year on year to north of 170 million pounds (or $260 million), which was better than expected. Earnings on a per-share basis were five pence versus the expected four pence, amounting to a beat of a penny per share. Its shares are rising by 9 percent both in the U.K. and on the Nasdaq in the U.S.

ARM, you’ll recall, is the company behind the designs that go into building the chips that land in most smartphones and tablets. Rather than make the chips, ARM licenses its blueprints to companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, which then make their own chips. And since phones and tablets are growing a lot faster than traditional PCs (come to think of it, PCs actually aren’t growing at all), ARM is looking a lot healthier than traditional chip companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Here’s a pretty good indicator: Royalty payments for processors rose in the quarter by 33 percent versus a processor industry that’s up about 2 percent.

ARM is quickly turning out to be the company to watch in the chip space. Chips sporting ARM designs are everywhere these days, and there has been a lot of chatter of late about them heading into the data center.

Hewlett-Packard offers ARM processors as an option on its radical new server design, called Project Moonshot. Dell offers ARM-based servers, too, and there are even more plans for ARM chips in servers. I talked with CEO Warren East about this last year. (East is retiring this summer, by the way, and Simon Segars will be ARM’s new CEO, starting in July.)

The basic argument that ARM makes coming in is that its chips are good at managing power consumption, in part because they were designed from the beginning for mobile applications. And power consumption continues to be a huge problem, especially in data centers where thousands of servers are crowded together in one place.

Intel, the king of the chip world, has responded and created its own line of low-power chips called Atom. And as we learned from Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip business at D: Dive Into Mobile last week, it has gotten off to a slow start but is starting to get a little traction in mobile.

Another version of Atom, announced the week before last, will also defend Intel’s interests in the server space. But keep an eye on this, because there’s eventually going to be a rumble.

The numbers issued Monday were at the high end of the company’s predictions. TI also forecast ranges for profit and revenue in the current quarter with midpoints that were higher than analysts expected.

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According to a report by Anand Lal Shimpi on AnandTech.com, Raja Koduri, who spent the last four years at Apple overseeing its graphics chip work, has rejoined AMD.

The move follows a similar one last year by Jim Keller, who had been Apple’s chip design guru working on its mobile A4, A5 and A6 chips that go inside the iPad and iPhone.

In his last stint at AMD, Koduri (pictured) was CTO for graphics and worked extensively on some of its best graphics products. His new job will be corporate vice president of visual computing, and he’ll be responsible for both the hardware and software sides of AMD’s graphics efforts.

“This is a great hire for AMD,” analyst and former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead told AllThingsD. “Raja did great things when he was at AMD and then played a huge role in making Apple’s mobile graphics the fastest in the industry. It’s also a huge loss for Apple, and it seems to be losing some very good talent these days.”

Koduri has also taken a role with an India-based graphics chips outfit called Makuta VFX as a technical adviser to its board of directors.

Before AMD, Koduri worked at ATI, the Canadian graphics chip company that AMD acquired in 2006, and before that he worked at S3, another graphics chip company.

Intel, which supplies chips for most of the world’s PCs, has been grappling with a stark decline in PC sales. Data released last week by two research firms fed pessimism; one of the steepest year-on-year drops in global PC shipments was read as another sign that the growing use of smartphones and tablets is sapping demand for desktops and laptops.

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Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

As it happens, the report came a week before chipmaker Intel is due to report quarterly earnings on April 16. In a research note today, Stacy Rasgon of Sanford Bernstein sized up its prospects for the quarter and the rest of the year.

There’s a chance that the actual on-the-ground results may yet be worse than what the research firms detected. Relying on data from Taiwanese notebook manufacturers including Compal, Quanta and Wistron, sales were down in the first quarter by more than 18 percent, worse than the 11 percent to 13 percent drop reported by Gartner and IDC.

So what does that mean for Intel, the world’s largest supplier of computer chips and long considered an important bellwether of the overall tech economy? Nothing good, Rasgon argues. He expects Intel to report revenue of $12.43 billion, nearly $200 million below the consensus expectation of $12.6 billion. He expects earnings on a per-share basis to be 41 cents.

“Given the recent atrocious PC numbers, we believe investors may not be hugely surprised by weak outlook at this point (at least, they certainly shouldn’t be now),” he wrote.

Other key questions for Intel: Who will be the next CEO? And will Intel say anything about it on the conference call after earnings are announced? If you haven’t been keeping track, here’s a good rundown on who’s likely to be in the race, both internal and external. (Here’s a hint: It’s going to be an internal contender; Intel has never hired an outside CEO.)

“It is rapidly approaching high time for the company to provide color on a replacement,” Rasgon wrote. “While it appears they are actively vetting both internal and external candidates, we do not expect significant strategic changes regardless of the eventual choice as they have started the ball rolling on several initiatives that would be difficult to stop. … We would hope (but do not necessarily expect) that the company could provide additional information on the succession plan.”

The chip maker’s shareholder returns for the year will include its regular quarterly dividend of 7.5 cents, amounting to about $50 million a quarter.

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CyOptics develops Indium Phosphide optical chips and components to enable bandwidth for high speed networks. It is a privately held company founded in 1999, with JVP Funds and TA Associates as its majority shareholders. The company’s revenue has more than tripled over the past three years, with net sales in 2012 reaching about $210 million, up 21 percent from a year earlier.

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In comments at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing overnight, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and head of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, described a rethink of how data centers might be designed. Currently, individual servers, each with its own computing and storage, are being packed tightly together in a rack, and in turn packed into a room with other similar racks.

Intel sees a world where all the computing and storage portions are separated. CPUs would be grouped together so they could be cooled together. They would in turn be linked to storage infrastructure by screaming-fast optical connections running as fast as 100 gigabits per second.

Eventually, Intel sees everything being separated into its own section of the rack: CPU, memory, storage and power. The point is that you’ll be able to upgrade one — swap out older memory modules for newer ones, or upgrade the CPUs, or replace a bad hard drive — without interfering with the operation of any of the other parts.

Intel’s play, Bryant said, is to offer a reference design — essentially a basic recipe for building the concept — to the big server manufacturers. And at least some portions of this concept are already operating in China. Intel has been working with Web commerce giant Alibaba, Web search concern Baidu, Chinese Internet company Tencent and China Telecom on something they call Project Scorpio. The idea is to centralize all the cooling and fans within the rack, and to demonstrate that you can save on operating costs.

There were new Intel chips disclosed, too. A chip code-named Avoton is due in the second half of this year. It’s a version of Intel’s lightweight Atom processor, aimed at small servers — not unlike HP’s Project Moonshot — that will be built on Intel’s latest 22-nanometer manufacturing process, and with a new design. In Intel’s recent “tick-tock” parlance, where it delivers a new design — a tick — then shrinks it with an new smaller manufacturing technology — a tock — this is effectively both.

Another chip, code-named Rangeley and also due in the second half of the year, is a 22-nanometer variant of Atom that will be aimed at networking devices, routers, switches and whatnot.

There were also three versions of the Xeon chip discussed. The next E3 will get some new tricks to support video analytics workloads. The next Xeon E5 will move to the 22-nanometer manufacturing process (that’s a tock), and will be available in the fall. Finally, a new Xeon E7 will be available in the fourth quarter. Its newest trick is that it can address three times the memory of its predecessor — up to 12 terabytes.

The chip maker calls the forthcoming product the Grid Visual Computing Appliance, a server-style device that is packed with Nvidia technology and runs software that normally requires expensive workstations that typically reside in company offices.

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Mr. East, 51 years old, who joined ARM in 1994 when the company was in its infancy, will hand the reins to ARM President Simon Segars on July 1. He said Tuesday it was time for someone with new energy to see the company through its next phase of growth.

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AMD CEO Rory Read

Rumors of the move have been in the air for some time, as part of an ongoing reorganization of the company under CEO Rory Read. It’s also fairly common. AMD has been leasing its own headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., since 1998, the company said.

AMD sold the buildings to a unit of Spear Street Capital. The fresh injection of cash will be reflected in its balance sheet when AMD reports quarterly results in April. And it should ease — if only just a bit — concerns raised earlier this year by the debt-rating agency Fitch. In January, that firm downgraded AMD’s long-term debt to CCC from a B, two notches below investment grade. Specifically, Fitch said it expected AMD’s free cash flow to turn negative, and worried that it might even go so low as to “potentially approach the company’s minimum operating level.”

AMD’s last big shakeup involved the slashing of 15 percent of its workforce.

The San Diego-based company is best known for baseband processors, which manage the overall chore of communicating over cellular networks. These are digital chips, handling data in the form of ones and zeros.

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The former AMD chief has written a book that memorializes his bet-the-company decision in 2005 to file an antitrust case against its much larger rival, a volume of roughly 200 pages that comes with heavy doses of David versus Goliath imagery. It’s called “Slingshot,” and subtitled “AMD’s Fight To Free An Industry From The Ruthless Grip Of Intel.”

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